G'day Prasad,
As a side-note have any of you noticed that the 9/11
Memorial Wiki has
not been deleted despite ample consensus being achieved towards its
deletion? Don't you guys feel that there were far greater tragedies
which occured during the 20th century-like World War 2 or the
Holocaust or the Nagasaki-Hiroshima Nuclear bombing, apartheid in
Africa, to name a few? Making such a big deal about the loss of 3000
lives while fully neglecting much more horrific incidents is a
shockingly clear example of how America-centric Wikipedia has become.
I urge someone to please delete this absurd memorial which seems (in a
way) to place the people who died on 9/11 on a much higher pedestal
than (for example) the 7 million who were murdered in Nazi Germany.
It may have escaped your notice, but the "9/11 Memorial Wiki" is not a
part of Wikipedia (IIRC it's on Wikicities, but ICBW). It therefore
slots neatly into that segment of the Internet that I like to pleasantly
describe as "my not-giving-a-fuck zone". I'm sure most Wikipedians have
a similar view. It is *not* our problem, *not* our business, and *not*
our fault that it exists. Now, there are good reasons for it to be
created, and good reasons for it to not have been created. And it's my
pleasant duty, as a good (I hope) Wikipedian, to happily Not Give A Fuck
about those reasons, or indeed any other project on the Internet that
happens to have the word "wiki" in it somewhere.
You cannot infer anything about Wikipedia from the existence of an
unrelated project, and I'll thank you not to even make the attempt. And
for what it's worth, we are getting *less* America-centric, not more.
The project began in America, and for a time (with a few brave
exceptions) was largely American. We still bear the scars! But slowly
we're getting more viewpoints, better spellers, etc., etc.
In a way, it's rather frustrating to have someone from a non-Western
culture show up and immediately begin behaving incredibly badly,
screaming about "Zionist conspiracies on Wikipedia" and so on. We
*need* editors who don't share the same worldview, but we *don't* need
lunatics. Do you think you could muster up some people who can combat
our systemic bias problem but also wouldn't go flying off the deep end
and start confusing neutrality with Zionism? Because that would be very
welcome.
--
Mark Gallagher
"What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse
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